ORLANDO — As a child in a small town northwest of Phoenix, Ken Graham became fascinated by Arizona's monsoons, lightning storms and desert flooding.

Weather has remained his passion throughout his adult life, and his meteorological career has landed him a high-profile job in the South Florida tropics. Sunday, Graham starts work as director of the Miami-based National Hurricane Center.

“I’m super excited. I think, at the same time, really humbled. I’m a forecaster and meteorologist at heart. I’ve been telling everybody I’ve wanted to do this since I was 7 years old,” Graham said Wednesday during the National Hurricane Conference at Hilton Orlando.

“We’re in the heart of preparedness season. So I’m going to really hit the ground running, talking to folks about preparedness for the hurricane season. It’s going to be a quick ramp-up,” Graham said.

The 2018 Atlantic hurricane season kicks off June 1 and lasts through Nov. 30.

The National Hurricane Center’s last permanent director was Rick Knabb. He served from 2012 until last May, when he returned to his former job as a hurricane expert on The Weather Channel.

“The director’s really the face of the organization to the outside world, to the media, the emergency management community. The director’s job has a big outward-facing component, in terms of our outreach and preparedness messaging so that everyone gets ready for hurricane season," said Mike Brennan, branch chief of the NHC’s hurricane specialist unit.

“And also, during a land-falling hurricane, he becomes the face of the real-time messaging through our media pool and interviews and television, trying to get the word out," Brennan said.

The “extremely active” 2017 Atlantic hurricane season produced 17 named storms — including the first two major hurricanes to strike the continental U.S. since Wilma hit Florida in October 2005.

Harvey dumped more than 60 inches of rain on southeast Texas, triggering catastrophic flooding and causing at least 68 deaths in the Lone Star State. Then Irma swept across the Caribbean and struck Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, directly causing seven deaths and indirectly causing 85 more in the U.S., the NHC reported.

We break down 5 things that people will be paying for from Hurricane Irma one way or another long after this hurricane season ended. Christina LaFortune, Dave Berman, Wayne T. Price and Tim Walters. Posted Sept. 15, 2017

Shortly afterward, Maria walloped the Caribbean and Puerto Rico.

In addition, Cindy made landfall in Texas; Emily and Phillipe struck Florida; and Nate came ashore in Mississippi.

All said, 10 hurricanes churned across the Atlantic basin last year, including six major hurricanes of Category 3, 4 or 5 strength. That ranked as the seventh most-active season on record, dating to 1851.

"What a historic season. For me, I’m so fortunate I'm going to work with some amazing world-class scientists at the Hurricane Center. The forecasts, the modeling are getting so much better," Graham said.

"It's a challenge anywhere when you're talking about these tropical systems — these impacts could be literally hundreds of miles away. So the communications part is still such a challenge," he said.

Graham earned a bachelor’s degree in atmospheric science from the University of Arizona and a master’s degree in geoscience from Mississippi State University. During graduate school, he worked as a broadcast meteorologist at WCBI-TV in Columbus, Mississippi.

He went on to work National Weather Service jobs in Fort Worth, Texas; Silver Spring, Maryland; Birmingham, Alabama; and Corpus Christi, Texas. Most recently, he was meteorologist-in-charge of the National Weather Service’s New Orleans/Baton Rouge office since 2008.

With June 1 looming on the calendar, Graham said residents along hurricane-vulnerable coasts should review their storm-preparation plans.

"Take the lessons learned from last season and start looking at your own plan. Even with my own family, we do that every year about this time of year — we review where we would go if we were evacuated, we review what papers we need to bring with us, or medicines," Graham said.

"When you’re staring at a hurricane, how difficult it is to start thinking about the planning process," he said.